Mina Loy - Insel

“Your suit has turned white,” I announced.

A gleam of crafty assurance stole into his transparent eyes.

“You will never ‘get out’ while your suit is white,” I threatened, “all die Mädchen are on the other side of the wall —”

“Oh,” said Insel with a conciliatory smile, “I only want them to look at.”

“Well, they won’t look at you until your suit is black; and as we’re about it you’d better let me clean your shirt.”

His shirt was of a dark gray design rather mellow. When I suggested renovation he clutched it by the open throat.

“See,” he said, lifting it with a cautious yet ostentatiously offhand gesture, “the neckband is worn ragged inside — it’s not worth it.” He was cowering in some apprehension that constricted him, that even devitalized his hand. Become as the hand of a victim of infantile paralysis, it flopped over with the edge of the stuff. He had an air of shifting — just so far — the bandage of a wound.

Not for the first time, with Insel, I received a subliminal flash of an apostate Saint Sebastian writhing with arrows — in such privacy, it would be indelicate to intrude upon it with whatever assistance.

On looking back, it seems inconsistent, that once the elation he inspired in me died down— I should have continued in my obsession of conserving something very precious with an Insel changing to an incubus, playing his silly psychic tricks on his clothes — raving of imprisonment and the gnawing of Knochen . It had left me with the solicitude one might have for a valued friend with whom one has been on some glorious drinking bout, when he shows up next day at a disadvantage in a particularly nasty hangover.

One last struggle with the suit — and it turned black again. Insel must have forgotten about it.

“BREAKFAST,” I ANNOUNCED.

This time Insel did not stir.

His head, although returned to normal volume scarcely indented the pillow. He was set in the perfect quadrates of a couch, having no rumple anywhere. As he lay upon it without taking contact with it, the comfortable bulges of covers tucked under a mattress sharpened to corners of trigonometric exactitude.

The smoothing systemizing vibrations that straightened his surroundings, obviously did not issue from his frame, which had half-died for contributing vitality to some focus of force.

Perhaps they were transmitted by his hair. I have always presumed that hair with its electric properties will not remain unutilized in a future evolution of the brain.

His hair — what little was left — was so fine, that without amalgamating, it had the unity of surface of the horny plate with which hair furnishes the extremities in its aggregate form of a nail.

Tentatively — I touched that hair, repeating “Breakfast” on a cheerful note — to appear as if I were patting his head to wake him up.

In a decreased microscopic degree, my fingers encountered the same onslaught as had my whole person in the corridor. A sharp crackle of inconceivably minuscule machine guns carried to some psychic center of my ear.

The effect was astonishing as when I had tapped him on the arm. Insel did not awaken — he turned his head as if he were pushing it up into strata of delight above him. Which on contact melted upon his face in a slow smile.

He was smiling as if the tip of the wing of an angel had fanned him.

Again, as I watched, I had the sensation of “breaking point,” an expectance of a spring flying loose to whirr insanely.

His face, like stale bread smeared with his private honey, stood still.

Then it broke.

With the unforeseen ugliness opening up suddenly emerging hippopotami the gums in their hideous defenselessness observed me — an obscene enjoyment of ill-will pleated his clamped lids.

His teeth had not decayed. They were worn down.

Der Totenkopf hung in my tract of vision like the last of Alice in Wonderland’s Cheshire cat.

Getting in touch with Insel was the whole itinerary of Good and Evil.

In the passing away of a miasma Insel awakened. Although never much the better for food, his temperament having relieved itself of some disproportionate impulse in that monomaniac gape, he now seemed normalized.

It was a serene creature who began to breakfast. Whatever introspective conflict usually engaged him, it had ceased.

“You really look rather well now. Why don’t you just stay and have that rest cure here . I’ll hire Bebelle to feed you — do everything for you while you lie down and drowse till you’re quite fit. I must get back to Saint-Cloud.”

“Impossible,” moaned Insel, instantly sagging, “I have to return to my troubles. You do not understand. They are my life. It waits for me.”

“Nonsense, you spent the night in Montparnasse in one incessant gurgle of laughter.”

“It was a hollow laughter,” he intercepted, sepulchrally. Insel had resumed his “line” which seemed so inadequate.

Should I risk an attempt to reveal to Insel those real-essences in Insel? Real-essences to a slight degree rationalized for my mind, they might be either the very symptoms of the so-called madness in him, or precisely the incognizable cause of his befuddlement.

“Insel,” I set out determinedly. “You must get over your ugliness — it’s an obsession! That’s not all there is to you — you have some intrinsic quality I have never found in anyone else. It’s difficult to tell you about it because I have no idea what it is. But it’s something so valuable it’s one’s duty to keep you alive to discover its nature.”

“Several alienists have offered to examine me— regularly—” said Insel, with self-complacence, “twice a week!”

“It’s not pathological — only unprecedented. A kind of radio-activity you give off—. Insel,” I asked puzzled, “how does the world look to you? Like an Aquarium?”

Insel looking no less puzzled than myself, I was taken aback. But I went on in the hope of striking common ground.

“It was the evening outside the Lutetia I experienced its effects. A sort of doubling of space where different selves lived different ways in different dimensions at once. Sitting on the sidewalk — floating in an Atlantic Ocean full of skyscrapers and ethereal cars. That was not particularly important— the wonder was the sense of timeless peace — of perfect happiness—”

INSEL SAT BOLT UPRIGHT IN HIS COUCH AND LET out a thin screech like a mad cat; looking exactly as if he had caught a mouse he had watched for a long time.

“No.” He wagged his poor bald head judiciously, “ It cannot be —I can only love forever.”

I gave one gasp — then as always when taken unawares, my mother reproved me from my subconscious — a sophisticated middle-aged woman making immodest impressions on an innocent Schlosser’s son.

“You misunderstand. I had thought of you as a ‘Will-o’-the-Wisp.’ ”

Insel took no heed, he was practically licking his chops. Quite as if it were an impulse habitual to me, I decided to slug him.

Then he began moaning again — of suffering, which one moment, he could allow me to share, and another, he refused to cause me.

“It would be too fearful for you — the Parting,” he pointed out. “You see,” he confided affectionately as if promising me a present, “I am going to get her back—”

A spiral craftiness wormed into his eyes as I asked, “Where is she?”

“In South Africa,” he answered with some impatience, as if I should have remembered.

This girl in her role of “only beloved” was almost as unsettled as Insel himself. Only yesterday she lived with her Lesbian in Berlin — and now, “Since she left me she has married twice and borne four children.” Before very long she actually split in two—